Bing brings jingle contest to YouTube

Google’s newest competitor tries to stir up excitement with some social media fun

Do you have some Bing love to share with the world? You could be $500 richer in a couple weeks!

The Microsoft Bing blog, probably in hopes of garnering some quick and easy attention across social media networks, announced the “Bing Jingle Contest” yesterday.

According to the blog post, the best YouTube entry for the catchiest “Bingle” will earn the winner a $500 American Express gift cheque: “Since everyone is having fun with the name, we thought it would be interesting to see what you can do with it, put to a little music! Got a fun jingle, or as we like to say in the halls around here “Bingle” you want to share?”

The search engine was officially christened Bing as a form of onomatopoeia for the sound one “hears” when one finds that just right search result. With recent hype over the engine’s launch and never-ending comparisons to Google, however, critics and jokers have fallen back on calling it an abbreviation for “But It’s Not Google.”

Bing is Microsoft’s latest attempt in a long history of iterations to deliver an engine powerful enough, relevant enough, and aesthetically pleasing enough to get users to move from Google, the unshakeable Internet search monster for years now.

Despite Microsoft’s $100 million advertising campaign to raise brand awareness for Bing, a J.P. Morgan study demonstrated that 70% of users are not switching search engines, with most still using Google.

Can a silly YouTube contest do much more for the search engine that $100 million has not done already? Probably not.

Nevertheless, the contest must go on. Interested participants have until the end of July to enter a video and one lucky winner will be announced on August 5.

(Of course, with Microsoft it’s never all fun and games: the blog staff just had to publish the painfully legal “Official Rules” for the contest, eight times the length of the actual contest announcement, right underneath.)

*** Update 08/06/09 ***

The contest winner was announced yesterday: "Bing Goes the Internet" by Jonathan Mann. Watch it here: